French illustrator Georges Delaw was born in 1871 in Sedan, close to the border with Belgium.
As a student he began drawing cartoons for the college paper,
and their popularity convinced him that his future was as an illustrator.
So in 1893 when he was 22 years old he left Sedan for Montmartre, the artist's community in Paris.
He quickly became a regular feature at the Chat Noir cabaret as a writer and creator of Théâtre
d'Ombres - a series of projected silhouette puppet shows which were very popular with the patrons.
And around the same time he began creating illustrations for several
Parisian newspapers and magazines including Le Rire, and La Baionnette.
In 1902 Delaw's book 1001 Journeys of Placide Serpolet was published and it's now considered
to have made a significant contribution to the early development of French comics.
Unlike most of his contemporaries who favoured hatching and lithographic shading
Delaw seems to have been determined to pursue a looser and simpler approach to image making.
As far as I can tell he was the first to do this, and he was followed a few years
later by the younger illustrators Charles Genty and Joseph Hemard.
This style was later influential on Hergé's work for TinTin
and is generally recognised as the foundation of the style known now in Europe as the clear line.
I haven't been able to find any information about Delaw's methods and use of media,
so I'll rely on pure guesswork again.
Most of the images look as if they have been created using pen, or possibly brush and ink,
and then colour added with fairly casual watercolour washes.
His magazine illustrations would more than likely have been printed using either chromolithograhy
or zincotype, as offset colour lithography was considered too expensive by such publications.
It's also quite likely that some of his book illustrations were created as pochoir
prints, which were popular at the time in France.
Throughout the first decade of the 20th century he was in great demand to illustrate popular
French songs which were collected in various albums, compete with the musical scores.
When the First World War started in 1914
he joined the army and despite being involved in some horrific battles he managed to survive.
On his return to civilian life he resumed his career,
and in addition to illustrating his own text he took commissions to create
images for others including Anatole France and a collection of Charles Perrault's classic tales .
Like many before and since he also created colour illustrations for a distinctively styled edition
of Hans Christian Andersen's Tales in 1920.
He continued to be prolific with magazine and book work throughout the 1920s,
and his continued success appeared assured.
But unfortunately as the 1930s began he suffered a stroke.
He survived, but tragically it left him partially paralysed and he was no longer able to draw.
And Georges Delaw died in 1938 when he was 67.
Comic enthusiasts, particularly in the U.S.A. may be familiar with the name Raeburn
Van Buren as the artist of the comic strip Abbie an' Slats.
But even they are less likely to know about his other equally impressive work as an
illustrator.
He was born in Colorado in 1891 and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri.
In his teens he worked at the Kansas City Star newspaper
as an assistant to their cartoonist Harry Wood.
But Van Buren was ambitious and in 1913 at the age of 22
he moved to New York in the hope of making a name for himself.
Before long he was successfully contributing cartoons and illustrations
to several humour magazines including Puck and Life.
But this promising start to his career had to be put on hold
when America declared war on Germany in 1917 and Van Buren enlisted in the army.
While serving he used his talent for illustration to create patriotic cartoons
which were published in military newspapers to boost morale.
When the war ended he picked up where he had left off,
and he added yet more magazines to his client list, including large circulation
publications such as Collier's, McCalls and the prestigious Saturday Evening Post.
Most of Van Buren's work was created as monochrome and at this stage of his career
he preferred to use conté crayon and pencil.
This gave his images visual energy and spontaneity, although in his later work
he would gravitate increasingly towards the more precise use of pen and ink.
There are a relatively small number of images showing his use of colour,
but even there it was always the line which was at the heart of the illustration's visual appeal.
He was kept busy throughout the 20s with more commissions from his usual clients
and in the 1930s he also worked on a regular basis for both the New Yorker and Esquire magazine.
His generally romantic and carefree themes made him a popular choice
to illustrate the sheet music for the melodies of the day, and his lightly comic line and
generally flat colour illustrations appeared frequently on their covers.
In all his work he showed remarkable dexterity with goodnatured humour
and depictions of provocative willowy females,
and he had a natural facility for translating written narratives into eloquent visuals.
Despite it becoming his best known work he didn't start illustrating
Abbie an' Slats until fairly late in his career in 1937, when he was already 46 years old.
The strip's concept came from Al Capp as
an offshoot from his already wildly successful Lil' Abner.
And as his other commitments kept him too busy to draw it he recruited Van Buren.
And it was this strip which defined Van Buren's later career, even though he did continue to
create other work up to his eventual retirement in 1971.
And he subsequently died in Long Island at the age of 96 in 1987.
The children's illustrator known as Tom Seidmann Freud was actually female and
born Martha Freud in Vienna in 1892, the niece of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
When she was 9 years old the family moved to Berlin,
and in her teens she began using the nickname Tom, and it stuck.
So it was Tom Seidmann Freud who went on to study art in London, Berlin and Munich.
There's no definitive information about it but she would have completed her studies some time around
1914 and in that year her first illustrated book The Baby's Songbook was published.
Her illustrations were created as line with pen and ink
and printed using the pochoir stencil method,
and although already quite minimal and generally flat, they usually featured a fairly organic line.
But not much later she would begin pursuing a more overtly geometric almost diagrammatic style
which would become the defining feature of all her work for the rest of her career.
In 1918 she moved to Munich and it was there she met and married
the writer Jakob Seidmann a couple of years later.
In 1923 in partnership with her husband she set up the Peregrin publishing house
and under this imprint they published her surreal story The Fish's Journey.
The radically simplistic flat coloured illustrations were dreamlike, and although set in
an approximation of the real world magical events would take place as if they were perfectly normal.
In the same year The Book of Things was published
featuring a series of basic line and pochoir spot illustrations.
Seidmann Freud's Book of Rabbit Stories was published in the following year,
and once again the illustrations were simply drawn and formally laid out
with characters who remained curiously expressionless throughout the book,
giving the images what some would consider an eerie, unsettling quality.
And yet the books sold well enough if not in the
considerably greater numbers of more mainstream offerings.
Around this time the couple also created the Ophir publishing house in Berlin
with the Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, to produce Hebrew language books for children.
But it proved to be far from successful and they lost money with this venture.
But Peregrin continued to thrive and as well as her own books Seidmann Freud also
illustrated classics of children's fantasy with stories from the Tales of the Brothers
Grimm and those of Hans Christian Andersen in her own deadpan style.
In 1927 she published The House of Wonders, which was an interactive
picture book with moving elements, giving the book increased engagement for young readers.
And she repeated this winning format with the magic Boat 2 years later in 1929.
But this was also the year the company ran into serious financial problems
and in the wake of its collapse Jakob Seidmann committed suicide.
And distraught by the loss of her partner a few months later
Tom Seidmann Freud took an overdose of sleeping pills and died at the age of 38.
Only a handful of years later her books were burned by the Third Reich
simply because Seidmann Freud had been born Jewish.
I've only been able to find a few lines of biography in Italian about the film poster
artist Anselmo Ballester, and very few examples of work from his early career.
So this segment will be on the patchy side - but luckily his
work is well worth putting up with that for.
He was born in Rome in 1897, the son of a successful artist,
and he later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
Even by the age of 18 he was already creating film posters
such as this quite sexually explicit example from 1915.
He set himself up in a studio in Rome in about 1920 and by all accounts was quite successful.
But as I mentioned there's not much evidence of
the work he created and little of any real significance until the mid 1930s.
Luckily from this point on there are abundant examples of his gloriously melodramatic posters,
and he worked exclusively in this arena for the rest of his career.
All his work showed him to be an accomplished painter and the vivid colours,
dramatic lighting effects, and energetic compositions he favoured produced posters
which were frequently more sensational and entertaining than the films they promoted.
Ballester's ideas were visualised as small colour sketches on board or paper,
and once the colour sketch had been approved or amended he
would then repaint it at a greatly enlarged scale using tempera paint.
Most commonly they would feature the leading actors set in a composite format,
frequently alongside an iconic aspect or scene from the film's narrative.
Given that he was expected to create convincing likenesses of the leading actors
he was invariably provided with photographic reference from the relevant production.
Once the titling and text were added the poster was printed in lithographic full colour.
It's not conclusive but the evidence suggests the lettering and typograhy
was handled by the studio rather than created as part of his artwork.
He used colour with considerable daring and with great dramatic effect.
Frequently characters would be portrayed using only one or two colours and heavy expressive
black, and he would offset this with other elements featuring completely different palettes.
His success continued undiminished through the 1940s and 50s
and he created a vast number of vivid compelling posters not only for
Hollywood productions but increasingly for Italian and even occasional British films.
But by the mid 1960s film companies were turning increasingly to photographic posters,
and realising the adverse effect this would have on his ability to make a living
Ballester retired from commercial work altogether in 1964 at the age of 67.
In a career of around half a century he had created thousands of posters
and he died in Rome at the age of 77 in 1974.
And that's it for this quartet of heroes so it's goodbye for now
and I hope I'll see you soon with another batch.